Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Issued:News from Hsinhua News Agency, September 8, 1968. [EROL note: capitalization has been added]Reprinted:Peking Review, No. 39, September 27, 1968.Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.

London. September seventh (Hsinhua) – the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which was formed recently, has issued a statement denouncing the soviet revisionist renegade clique for its flagrant armed occupation of Czechoslovakia and its act of forcing the Dubcek revisionist clique of Czechoslovakia to make a dirty deal with it at bayonet point.

The statement says that “the revisionist leadership of the Soviet Union has committed an act of imperialist aggression against the people of Czechoslovakia. The country of the great October Revolution, the first workers’ state in history, has been betrayed by its wretched leaders, Brezhnev and Kosygin, the heirs of the anti-Marxist Khrushchev, into appearing in the eyes of the world like U.S. imperialism in Vietnam.”

Exposing the hypocritical features of the soviet revisionist renegade clique in preaching “peace” in season and out, the statement says, “They proclaimed the principle of peaceful co-existence when it meant betraying the world revolutionary struggle against the imperialist powers headed by the U.S. They proclaimed the principle of peaceful transition when it meant disarming workers in the face of the capitalist’s enemy. But when it came to dealing with a tiresome satellite state of its own nothing was heard of their devotion to the cause of ’peace’.

“To understand how the crime of imperialist aggression came to be committed by the soviet revisionist leadership on august 20th it is necessary to appreciate the complete reversal of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union from the time of Khrushchev on. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union under the dictatorship of the proletariat, established by Lenin and defended by Stalin, was based on proletarian internationalism – unremitting opposition to the aggressive policies of imperialism and fraternal support to workers’ movements anywhere in revolt against imperialist domination. From the time the Khrushchevian revisionists replaced the workers state in the Soviet Union with the ’state of the whole people’ which meant eroding the dictatorship of the proletariat to restore a bourgeois dictatorship. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union has been based on an agreement with U.S. imperialism to divide the world up between them into two spheres of influence. The U.S. could do what it liked to secure its economic aggrandisement in its own sphere and the Soviet leaderships hoped to be allowed by the U.S. to do the same in its sphere.”

The statement says, “this collusion between the two blocs is illustrated by the fact that when the soviet leaders decided to invade Czechoslovakia, they informed Washington first and throughout the whole crisis the U.S. leaders have raised only token objections.” The statement points out that as a result of its defeat in Vietnam, the U.S. is much too anxious for soviet assistance in peddling the “peace talks” fraud to try to take advantage at this time of the Soviet leadership’s difficulties in its own east European sphere.

The Soviet leadership’s claim that they invaded Czechoslovakia to defend “socialist gains” is absurd because that leadership has been busily engaged in rejecting socialism and restoring capitalism in the Soviet Union itself, it says. What the soviet leadership is defending in Czechoslovakia is not socialism, but the political, economic and military subordination of certain countries in eastern Europe – the system whereby the new ruling class in the Soviet Union controls the trading relationships of these countries for its own imperialist advantage, thus turning them into satellites.

The statement says that in terms of betrayal the real interests of the working people of Czechoslovakia there is nothing to choose between Novotny and Dubcek; but the latter incurred the wrath of the soviet leadership by trying to obtain additional economic advantages for his own faction through dealing directly with the western imperialist countries.

It stresses: “as between the soviet revisionist leadership which has betrayed world socialism and the Czechoslovak revisionist leadership which has betrayed socialism in Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party of Britain (ML) does not support either as the lesser of two evils. That would be like the revisionist Communist Party of Great Britain ’urging its members to support the Labour party as a lesser evil than the Tory party when they are both parties of British imperialism and enemies of the working class. We utterly repudiate all revisionists everywhere. Our support is for the working people of the Soviet Union who under Lenin’s leadership made the October Revolution and will surely rise up against the revisionist faction which has betrayed them and their proletarian brothers all over the world. Our support is for the working people of Czechoslovakia who will surely learn from their recent experiences to denounce their own revisionist leaders, whether old-style Novotny or new-style Dubcek and re-establish the dictatorship of the proletariat so that their country can go forward in the great company of the peoples of China and Albania and all others who firmly reject the vicious exploitative system of capitalism and take the socialist road away from the exploitation in any form of man by man.”

It calls on all those members of the revisionist Communist Party of Great Britain who have realised the harm of revisionism to reject once and for all the sham communist party which the leaders of that party have made of it and rally to the Marxist-Leninist banner.

To conclude, the statement quotes Chairman Mao as saying:

“The people of all countries, the masses comprising more than 90 per cent of the entire population, sooner or later want revolution and will support Marxism-Leninism. They will not support revisionism. Though some people may support revisionism for a while, they will eventually cast it aside....they are bound to oppose the imperialists and reactionaries in all countries; they are bound to oppose revisionism.”